WAN Governance

Hybrid IT on the rise: welcome, hybrid backbone

Let's welcome a post from Frank Lyonnet, VP Product Marketing at Ipanema Technologies, who talks about hybrit IT and hybrid networks.

The question is not whether organizations will adopt the Cloud, it's about when and how. Enterprises prepare for a long transition period in which they will see a hybridization of their IT between private and public components. Whatever the application delivery model, the network will be at the heart of IT. Enterprises can now get the best of both private and public worlds through unified hybrid networks.

There is nothing impossible for the Cloud, every single piece of IT can be put into the Cloud from servers to desktops, from security to application delivery. Enterprises will start adopting one or another of those Cloud capabilities. Sometimes this will happen at a strategic level, like VALEO, a leading car equipment manufacturer that moved from Lotus Notes to Google Apps "to reduce significantly office infrastructure costs while simultaneously improving user collaboration and productivity". Sometimes it will be happen at a less visible level, like this chemical company that switched to a SaaS application for days off management and got a better service than with their legacy in-house system.

The Cloud is an evolution that will require transition periods. The older IT model - the private IT model - will seamlessly co-exist with the newer Cloud model - the public IT model. Enterprises need appropriate tools for a seamless coexistence of public and private components; they will need to think their IT as a hybrid IT. So were to start? IT of a distributed organization can be oversimplified: users across the globe (in branch offices, at home or at the hotel …) use various devices (PCs, Pads, Phones) to access, through the network, to multiple applications running on servers across the globe. Whatever the delivery model, public or private, the network is at the heart of IT.

All international organizations own a VPN, typically built around an MPLS backbone. The Virtual Private Network is perfect for secured communications between private IT components. Is it able to support the transition to the hybrid IT? Not in its actual format, just because it has been optimized for … private communications. Does it make sense to carry the ever growing public Internet traffic, sometimes business critical, sometimes not - like social networking - through high quality and pricey MPLS pipes? The answer is clearly no and this is why enterprises will adopt hybrid networks.

Gartner defines Hybrid Networks as the combination of MPLS VPN with broadband Internet links on which the enterprise is setting-up a secondary, secured but less reliable network using IPSec technology. While hybrid networks exist for years, they are not widely adopted as they were cumbersome to setup and manage. Until now there was no solution to easily and seamlessly unify MPLS and Internet VPNs into one.

Times they are a-changing. With Ipanema's hybrid network unification an enterprise no longer have to make a choice between fast or large pipes, between pricey and cheap networks, between business grade or standard grade links. A fast and XXL network is able to serve all applications whatever their business criticality and delivery model: private datacenter, private Cloud, public Cloud, SaaS … A dynamic, automated, application aware, sense and respond approach to WAN selection. Far from what legacy technologies like Policy Based Routing can deliver.

Immediate benefits from the hybrid IT is the reason why this Valeo switched to GoogleApps and to a unified hybrid network at the very same time. To the savings and productivity gain achieved with GoogleApps, they added extra savings and x3 overall capacity increase through their hybrid network.

A unified hybrid network is the backbone of a hybrid IT, the one that enterprises will use to seamlessly transition to the new world. Will everything ultimately collapse into the Cloud? Will enterprises definitely turn their head from IT burden to focus on their core business? Nobody would bet on this happening in a 5 year time frame. But in 10 or 15 years? Remember, there is nothing impossible for the Cloud.

Illustrations: Cyclone Catarina from the ISS on March 26^th, 2004 – High above the cloud the sun stays the same.

Cloud computing = Datacenter de-consolidation

The datacenter consolidation movement was triggered a few years ago by the need to simplify application delivery and to lower IT costs. The concentration of application servers has many advantages: it breaks local IT silos, it simplifies application maintenance and it unifies business processes. By reducing the number of remote servers, it significantly decreases hardware, software and operation cost. Of course, concentrating application servers from many remote offices and regional datacenters into a single location implies to rely on a WAN able to support a variety of application flows in a secure and efficient manner anytime. Bandwidth increase, MPLS and Internet ubiquity completed by WAN optimization and control technologies proved to be able to sustain this challenge. As a matter of fact, most of large enterprises are accomplishing or have already accomplished their servers' consolidation into one, two or three large central locations.

While Cloud computing can be seen as the next step of datacenter consolidation (collapsing private datacenters of many enterprises in one or a few shared mega-datacenters), I trust we can also see it as a very different animal. Like platform standardization (Intel, Windows, VMware) allowed to build and run efficient while flexible consolidated datacenters, application standardization and SaaS model (Salesforce, MS Exchange, Googleapp…) are transforming the consolidation movement from an infrastructure to a business application standpoint. Scale effect has its own asymptotic limit. What matters to the business is not to have more and more servers in a single location. What matters to the business is to select, customize and manage the right set of applications to run and transform its processes.

Enterprises will pick-up the general or specialized applications they need, wherever they are over the "Cloud". Starting from the application perspective, they will use as many "application-centers" as they have applications – honestly, who cares?

• Virtualization + Efficient WAN à Datacenter consolidation à Efficient IT
• Cloud-based applications + Efficient WAN à Application consolidation + Datacenter de-consolidation à Efficient business

Of course, this movement stresses the importance of the network as a key enabler of efficient business, in a hybrid [IT + network] environment without hard-center. This makes WAN governance more strategic than ever to understand, control and manage this new and open environment.

Relentlessly powered by Moore's law, filtered through the implacable selection of business reality, IT's evolution has not finished its course. Species we're living with right now are just temporary links in a long chain we're discovering a bit more each day…

Who wants to be a Millionaire?

No one is really interested to save money. Your kids aren't. Neither is your boss. They're kidding when they told they are. They all want more power, more security, more options, more speed, more free time, more education, more space, more dreams, more friends, more love.

Explorers, scientists, entrepreneurs, artists are not moved by money. They need dollars, euros, rupees, yens or yuans to make dreams happen and visions crystallize. Money before dreams? Ego before vision? These are road signs to decline, indications of no more territory to explore, discovery to make, innovation to offer and original work to undertake.

When the CEO tells the CFO who tells the CIO who tells the IT Director (who tells his suppliers) that she wants to save on IT, she is just joking. What she (he, he or he) wants is faster decision process, shorter implementation, improved flexibility, better customer service, more accurate indicators, more time to think…

This is the key difference between IT or WAN governance approaches and blind cost-cutting programs. Like a good doctor who treats the disease and not (only) its symptoms, holistic approaches address root causes of problems and offer sustainable solutions. At the end of the day, providing pragmatic solutions to oversized resources, inefficient processes, slow applications or disorganized operations is the fastest path to efficiency: Concentrate on cost and quality decreases – focus on quality and costs decrease.

Actually, the truly limited resource is time. Its fundamental limitation shapes every aspect of our life, every decision we (consciously or unconsciously) take. The proverb is wrong: time is much more than money. Who wants to be a millionaire? May be the right question should have been "who need to be a millionaire?"

Illustrations: Louise Bourgeois (Paris 1911 - New-York 2010) – "Give or Take" and "Maman" in front of Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. She recently passed away – What a character!

Hybrid Network Unification – Two birds with one stone [business continuity + application performance]

In his "Cost Cutting by Rightsizing Network Reliability" report, Neil Rickard (vice president in Gartner Research) suggests that "Enterprises should grade their sites by reliability needs because this is the biggest factor driving WAN costs" and proposes three key findings:

• Combining multiple, less-expensive services in parallel can deliver the same levels of reliability at lower prices than a single, high-quality connection.
• Reducing the reliability target for a location by one "9" (for example, from 99.99% to 99.9% availability) will typically save 30% of the WAN costs for that site.
• Transition costs, such as installation charges for new services, will typically eliminate half of the first year's savings.

This statement is the traditional driver for hybrid networking: adding a secondary link over Internet would provide the expected availability improvement (basically an additional "9") sought by IT and network managers while being (most of the time) cheaper than a second MPLS access line.

Now that the "network centric" approach to business continuity has been accepted, it's time to take it from an "IT centric" or even "business centric" perspective. Once you have "continuous access to the network", you need "continuous application performance". This is more important that it seems at first thought; let's remember the application brownout formula (5' = 1%) that states that only 5 minutes of poor performance a day decrease the enterprise productivity by 1%.

On average, preventing application performance brownouts (like unexpected variations in response time, too long transfer delays, demoralizing login time, etc.) and ensuring a perfect user quality of experience have an impact of the same order of magnitude (may be even larger) as moving network availability from 99% up to 99.9% or even 99.99%, i.e. from plain domestic Internet quality to business grade reliability.

That requires the same agility to handle application flows in the space dimension (which network?) as in the time dimension (acceleration, priorization, shaping…). Autonomic networking, enabling a strong coupling between QoS and control, WAN optimization and dynamic WAN selection seems the perfect candidate to get these two birds with one stone: perfect [business continuity + application performance] in a world of unified hybrid networks.

Illustration: la grande famille – René Magritte (1898-1967)

Hybrid network unification – Fast or large?

SearchEnterpriseWAN.com recently published an article from Jessica Scarpati about performance issues that may arise from using Internet as a backbone for Cloud and SaaS traffic ("Backhaul Internet traffic over the WAN? Cloud, SaaS performance may suffer"). Jessica rightfully insists on the lack of control across the Internet: "You can't write an SLA for the Internet", "Assessing SaaS performance (…) over the Internet is nearly impossible since the parameters constantly fluctuate"; etc.

On the other hand, Internet ubiquity and low cost makes it impossible to resist for Cloud and SaaS based applications, and already appealing for VPN traffic. So the question is no more "Internet or not Internet" but rather "how to get Internet benefits without its weaknesses?" This is becoming an important question that WAN governance has to answer.

A solution to this dilemma is to combine a predictable MPLS network with larger, cheaper but less stable Internet. While this is not a new situation, reality is that in most case this combination is "either MPLS or Internet (as a backup)"; in some case, router-based static PBR (policy based routing) is painfully configured to send low critical traffic to Internet and critical applications to MPLS. None brought the expected benefits, performance and agility that enterprises are looking for.

On the other hand, Dynamic WAN selection using real-time network performance assessment and application performance objectives allows enterprises to get the best of Internet (large bandwidth, access to public Cloud and SaaS) while assuring the performance of their critical applications with MPLS networks. Because of the variability of networks' performance and the dynamicity of the application traffic, dynamic WAN selection requires the ability of Autonomic Networking to learn and adapt in real-time to any situation and solve complex cases, like when several networks match the objectives – or none of them. Real life shows that Internet may be faster than MPLS – or not – or not everywhere - or not always… So voice and SAP can use Internet – or not – or not everywhere – or not always… How would you manage this manually?

Properly unified from an application performance point of view, hybrid networks can move us from the classical Fast OR Large? dilemma to a more appealing Fast + XXL situation.

Will enterprises jilt MPLS for Internet?

I was recently told by the IT director of a large chemical company that "with 20,000 users, 200 sites and +4G$ of revenues, why do I need a dedicated network? The Internet is already my backbone!" One of the arguments he used was that some of his most important applications, like SAP and emails were actually accessible through Internet in order to make them available for home and nomad workers.

His company actually moved forward with this idea and now all sites are connected with Internet VPNs and MPLS is used as a back-up for 30% of the premises where a poor SAP performance or availability will not be acceptable, for business as well as for psychological reasons (this approach might have been perceived as too much disruptive by some people in the company). The application traffic is managed according to hybrid network unification principles, ensuring the best of both worlds: cheap and ubiquitous Internet and business grade, predictable MPLS.

Although such a radical opinion is not yet common and MPLS having yet a lot of arguments to defend, we can see this move participate to the growing stream of hybrid IT that includes SaaS and other cloud computing approaches and which puts Internet in a very central position.

I trust that it will help us, enterprise network stakeholders - telcos, vendors and IT departments - to mature our thinking and clarify benefits, risk and overall value of enterprise networking for the business. If we all work well, alternative service architectures will rise, innovative products will grow and added-value services will flourish. If we don't, they will anyway…

Feel jilted? May be good news if lyrics are true: "…. I'm finally free - To try new ambitions - And learn new friends names …"

Illustration: "L'homme qui marche" – Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966)

Eyjafjallajökull, frozen airlines and WAN governance

This week, I'm happy to welcome a post from Mark Burton, Product Management Director at Ipanema Technologies, who has been inspired by a long long long waiting time in a European airport…

People often compare different types of networks when making analogies to communicate the benefits of different aspects of WANs and WAN Optimization technologies. Classes of service are often equated to the lanes on a highway, with certain lanes reserved for certain types of traffic; buses or multi-occupancy cars, for example. Equating this lane reservation with how an MPLS network manages voice or video is an excellent mechanism for illustrating the concept.

Similarly, I often equate QoS management of individual application flows with air traffic control. Again, conceptually this is a good analogy as Air Traffic Control specifically do not allow aircraft to take-off unless a landing slot is guaranteed at the destination. So it is with QoS management; the Ipanema System will hold packets in a queue until it determines that there is the capacity at the remote site to receive the traffic. As the Ipanema ip|engines collaborate together, just like the different Air Traffic Control services, you get great application performance even to sites without Ipanema ip|engine devices installed.

However, recent events have made me think hard about these analogies. Firstly, northern Europe was subjected to sustained period of very cold, snowy weather. In the UK, many many highways were shut. Other means of transporting people and goods had to be found. Perhaps not a good analogy for MPLS networks any more then...

Then, the Icelandic volcano under the Eyjafjallajökull glacier (see here for pronunciation) grounded all flights over most of Europe. Oh dear. Hundreds of thousands of stranded people and goods everywhere. Perhaps not a good analogy for QoS management either then.

But then it occurred to me that these events are actually also good illustrations for WANs and WAN Governance. What did we have to do when we couldn't travel by road? We switched to rail and air travel or we stayed at home. What did we do when the planes couldn't fly? We switched to cars, buses, trains, ships... or we sat in a hotel or waiting for the resumption of service. Businesses have the same types of choices.

What do you have to do when your primary network fails? Switch to a different network. Perhaps you back up your corporate MPLS network with an Internet based VPN. If you're very fortunate, you may actually have dual MPLS business networks deployed for resilience. When your main access becomes unavailable, you use policies to switch your data to the redundant data path. The business continues to run. Services may be degraded due to overloading, but things continue.

This is where WAN Governance and Hybrid Network Unification come in. With a WAN Governance system like the Ipanema System in place, your business objectives are automatically upheld, even in these "disaster" situations where the primary access has become available. The system adapts to the change in the nature of the network automatically and takes action to ensure that the resources that remain available are automatically allocated to the key business applications primarily, then to other types of traffic. Add in Hybrid Network Unification, an approach that enables you to fully use all your network resources simultaneously. A good WAN Governance system can use your business objectives automatically to provide dynamic WAN selection, using constantly updated performance metrics to decide which data network provides optimal performance for your application flows, flow by flow, in real-time, to meet your business objectives. If there's a failure, it's automatically detected and the system adjusts the traffic flows dynamically, in real-time to take the new situation into account.

This is just like in transport – the roads are not empty if the airlines are flying, people choose to drive or fly based on economic or business-policy reasons. If a traffic jam occurs, my satellite navigation system automatically routes around it if I'm on the way, or I choose a different transport method if I have not yet started my journey. We all make choices, both business-based and real-time, about the best way to travel and with the ubiquity of internet and the emergence of cloud-based services, it's now time to make the same business-based and real-time decisions about how best to serve your applications to your users.

(Illustration: Gigjökull, an outlet glacier extending from Eyjafjallajökull, Iceland - 13 February 2003(2003-02-13) – by Andreas Tille)

Meet the spec. AND make the business effective

Eric Knorr, editor in chief at InfoWorld, recently wrote a refreshing post about barriers to success for efficient IT in enterprises (see "The real secret to IT success"). Eric's finding is that such barriers are not technological – they're human (this is a good news, isn't it?) and he had the excellent idea to ask Bob Lewis his opinion about this (see "Make IT run "In" the Business – Not "As" a Business").

Bob and Eric talk about building trust between the CIO and IT organization and the rest of the business. It's not "Dr. Philian" – it's smart business. Just an excerpt: "When IT has internal customer, its job is done when it delivers software that meets specifications, not when the business has become more effective". Sound familiar?

When running IT as a business, the risk is large that operations only ("run") is delegated to the IT department – but what about the opportunity to use IT as a vector of change and progress for the business? There is a fair chance that no one would really be in charge of it, depriving the enterprise of one of the most powerful driver to shape its future.

Charging internal customers for the software and services they receive might well improve IT efficiency by making each business (including the IT department) "feel" the cost of IT and therefore be less wasteful. But that would also create friction among teams (IT being always too expensive and never performing enough), and encourage a short term view of value based in departmental rather than enterprise efficiency. This short view must then be compensated by the implication of IT managers in the business strategy.

WAN Governance, as part of an enterprise IT governance program, offers an alternative that increases IT value to the enterprise—as an enabler to achieve strategic goals and the CIO's influence in the C-level decision making that sets the goals. CIOs can control costs more effectively while instituting network and application performance metrics to help guide strategic decision making. Instead of being isolated as an in-house vendor, IT becomes more integrated into the enterprise. Priorities are no longer defined by individual line of business managers but by a senior leadership team where everyone must collaborate from a perspective of achieving enterprise goals.

We are seeing that enterprises that employ such governance principles are not only building trust and credibility among the rest of the business: they are getting better performance and save cost. So it's not only collegial to take the "Dr. Phil" point of view – it's good financial sense. Let's meet the spec. AND make the business effective.

(Illustration: The geographer, by Vermeer – 1669 – Frankfurt am Main, Germany)

Application-centric Managed Services: IT talking to IT

In its recent SPIT Manifesto, Ray LeMaistre, International Managing Editor of Light Reading, covers a lot of ground on the impact of telecom industry changes on Service Provider Information Technology (SPIT). LeMaistre points out how a service provider's IT department plays a much more critical role in achieving business objectives—such as:

•    Developing and monetizing new services/applications

•    Cutting costs

•    Migrating to next-generation networks

•    Improving customer care/experience

I believe Ray gets a fundamental trend: it is not more – at least not only – networking that will make the difference for added-value service: Telco's IT will be at the core of them. This is not that surprising if we understand that such added-value services address application delivery, i.e. the enterprise's IT department, not only its network team: its IT talking to IT, after all.

WAN Governance is exactly about this: aligning the network contribution to the enterprise's IT requirements. It is thus as an excellent federating concept for innovative managed services that providers can offer to increase their business value to enterprise customers—and their revenue. It gathers all the other types of application-centric VPN services, including Application Performance Management, QoS & Control, WAN Optimization and Hybrid Network Unification under a common umbrella.

Through WAN Governance, a service provider can help an enterprise customer align network requirements with business needs, ensure network rightsizing, and keep the network aligned for optimal applications performance with C-level WAN Governance dashboards. It is the type of managed service that enables enterprise IT departments to show greater business value to senior management, stretch IT budgets, and increase their loyalty and interest in other services from the provider.

Autonomic Networking coupled to a truly integrated multi-tenant platform reduces time to market with application-centric VPN services, and will offer huge advantages for any service provider still planning, evaluating or trying to implement their own "SPIT Manifesto." For example, global and domestic telcos such as Belgacom, BT, C&W, OBS, Reliance, Swisscom, Tata, Telecom Italia and many more already offer their own flavor of "application-centric" VPN managed services embracing WAN Governance, using the integrated SALSA multi-tenant management platform powered by Autonomic Networking.

Says LeMaistre, "Whether selling to consumers, enterprises, governments, other service providers, content owners, or applications developers, the SPIT systems underpinning a service provider's business strategy has never been more critical. The decisions that service providers make about their SPIT strategies could unleash unprecedented value for service providers, but, if handled poorly, it could put them years behind their competitors."

You can learn more about WAN Governance here and of course here (a bit self-referencing…), and moving beyond MPLS and into a variety of application-centric VPN services here.

Make IT run “In” the Business – Not “As” a Business

In a recent article for InfoWorld, Bob Lewis, who also writes InfoWorld's Advice Line blog and newsletter, compares running IT like a business to a train heading in the wrong direction—a train wreck waiting to happen. Bob's advice to CIOs: "Don't act like a separate business. Do the opposite—be the most internal of internal departments. Become so integrated into the enterprise that nobody would dream of working with anyone else." We agree and point to WAN Governance as one of the most critical tools for CIOs to do the job.

As any CIO knows, priorities today are to control IT costs and to improve the alignment of IT with business objectives. The conventional wisdom among CIOs has been to run IT as a business that sells to its internal customers. This approach to IT's role within an enterprise can be counterproductive. When you try to align the IT function by running it as an internal "business function," you actually do less to solve the real business issues. Instead, you become an order taker for software products to fulfill the requests of your internal customers.

It actually distances the CIO from the enterprise's overall strategy to improve business performance. Being an order taker instead of an expert hinders the ability to use IT to solve the real issues of cost efficiency and technical productivity.

When running IT as a business function, the traditional approach is to charge your internal customers for the software and services they receive—the logic being that impacting departmental budgets will improve IT efficiency by making each business "feel" the cost of IT and therefore be less wasteful. But that only creates friction – and a short term view of value based in departmental rather than enterprise efficiency. Dan Woods' recent commentary in Forbes highlights the common fear among CIOs in sufficiently pricing their services, and recommends ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) methodologies.

WAN Governance, as part of an enterprise IT governance program, offers an alternative that increases IT's value to the enterprise—as an enabler to achieve strategic goals and the CIO's influence in the C-level decision making that sets the goals.

With WAN Governance, CIOs can control costs more effectively while instituting network and application performance metrics to help guide strategic decision making. Instead of being isolated as an in-house vendor, IT becomes more integrated into the enterprise. Priorities are no longer defined by individual line of business managers but by a senior leadership team where everyone must collaborate from a perspective of achieving enterprise goals. The CIO becomes a strategic peer within the enterprise by explaining and recommending technology that can best enable the needed changes in business processes.

You can learn more about "how to" in our White Paper on WAN Governance (registration required).

(Illustration: Stazione dei treni di Trento - David Spigiolon)